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An early indicator that there might be slight conceptual problems with Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions is that you start to notice how clever everything is. Not necessarily the new additions, of which there are plenty, but the old stuff, like the way the collectable Geoms powering your multiplier encourage you to lurk dangerously close to your prey. The old stuff standing out is worrying enough in itself, but the deeper issue is that you're noticing it at all. With Bizarre Creations' Geometry Wars games there's traditionally never enough time to notice anything, let alone how brilliantly the systems slot together to entrap you. New developer Lucid's take on the series isn't slower - it's just a little less vital.Euclid pointed out the major snag 2000 years ago, in fact, when he defined a line (I had to look this quote up) as "breadthless length". You can't really improve on that, just as you can't really improve on the template that Bizarre Creations laid down, taking the wonderfully jittery twin-stick shooting of Robotron and rendering it smooth and cool and gleamingly abstract. This being video games, Bizarre itself came back for a second swing, and it's interesting to see how the developers handled that. Retro Evolved 2 kept the no-mess high-score mentality in place, but it twisted the central mechanics of moving and blasting into a variety of clever new modes.
With a campaign to fill, Lucid's opted for gimmicks rather than modes, and a lot of the time this actually works better than you might expect. The main offering here is an adventure suite built of dozens of unlockable stages. Some of them come with bespoke arenas, warping the flat plains of the classic games into 3D peanuts and pitcher's mounds and cough drops. Many of them have their own conceits, too. Alongside levels that borrow existing ideas like King and Pacifism, there are stages where nasty little Zambonis rumble around incrementally painting the landscape, and stages that get narrower and narrower as you play.
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